


The Songs of Crows

by Sandrine Shaw (Sandrine)



Category: The X-Files, Without a Trace
Genre: Crossover, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-02-16
Updated: 2012-02-16
Packaged: 2017-10-31 06:52:19
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,720
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/341180
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Sandrine/pseuds/Sandrine%20Shaw
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>A case brings demons from Samantha's past to the fore, and suddenly, the ice queen facade cracks.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Songs of Crows

The child's mother is weeping silently, whispering "She's gone." over and over again like a mantra. Jack sits beside her on the bed, helplessly, his hand drawing comforting circles on her back. He will have to ask questions later, get out every detail, every skeleton that the family might have hidden in the cupboard. But for now, all he does is offer as much comfort as he can. It's never enough, though.

Samantha stands beside them, abandoning her mental mapping of the room in favor of watching the scene unfolding in front of her. She feels strangely detached and personally involved at the same time. It's like a scene from her memory. Only of course, it isn't memory, can't be because she _wasn't there_. That's the point, now, isn't it?

She squeezes her eyes shut in a futile attempt to clear her head. This case is hitting home a little too closely. A little girl, 11 years old, disappeared from her bedroom at night. No signs of forced entry. She's just gone, as if she never was there to begin with. 

But she was.

There are photographs of her everywhere. Little Maggie as a baby. Maggie's first day of school. Maggie and her parents at the zoo. Maggie with the dog...

Samantha blinks. "Mrs. Whiteford?" she starts softly, which earns her a sharp look from Jack. Well, fuck him. She's all for comforting parents of a missing child, but time is running out. They don't know when she disappeared, but her mum last checked on her child when she went to bed last night, and that's almost 11 hours ago. They don't have the time for comfort now, not when they don't want to have more reason to comfort the mother in a couple of hours.

Chelsea Whiteford looks up to the blonde agent, her eyes red-rimmed. She might be a beautiful woman with a fragile, almost ethereal elegance when she's wearing make-up and she's less disheveled. Now, though, with her hair unkempt and her face swollen from crying, her face sallow and pale with worry, she looks like a ghost. "Yes?" Her voice is barely a whisper.

"Did the dog give alarm some time during the night?"

For a moment, she seems confused. "The dog?" Her gaze follows Samantha's to the picture. "Oh, Buddy. No, he... he ran away a couple of weeks ago. Maggie is distraught about it. She loves him so much. She always says... Oh God, I can't bring myself to use the past tense!" She buries her face in her hands, her body shaken by heavy sobs. Jack awkwardly puts an arm around her, exchanging a quick look with his agent. 

When they leave the house a little while later, each of them has a theory. Jack thinks someone took the dog, then used it to lure Maggie out of the house. Samantha thinks something else entirely, but she doesn't disagree with Jack. After all, his theory sounds plausible. She looks at the photo of Maggie they're going to pin to the board. The girl looks happy. 

Sometimes, Samantha hates her job.

* * *

The atmosphere in the office is tense. There are no jokes, no wisecracks from Danny, and no banter from Martin, none of Viv's dry wit. A child has gone missing, and it affects them all. They all have their own demons, their own reasons why they're here. Some demons are harder to fight than others, though.

The cup of coffee Martin has placed on Samantha's desk has long since gone cold. She's on her computer, researching other cases of missing children in the area. Jack and Vivian have gone to visit the girl's school; Martin and Danny are over at Danny's desk, discussing something. She can't hear them from where she's sitting, but she can see that tension on Danny's face that's always there when children are involved. She knows it has something to do with his own childhood, but she doesn't ask. Doing that would give him the right to ask her about _her_ demons in turn, and she's not willing to provide answers. 

She returns her concentration on the screen. Two other missing girls in the last four weeks, but the circumstances are different. One disappeared from her school. Dysfunctional family, bad marks. It doesn't necessarily mean she's run off, but chances are that there's no crime involved. The other one went missing when her mother took her shopping. She turned around for a moment and suddenly her child was gone. The police thought the girl would turn up eventually, having been lost somewhere in the store, distracted by something or the other, but she didn't. 

There don't seem to be any parallels to Maggie Whiteford. No real surprise there. A child disappears every 40 seconds. 

Samantha pushes herself up and walks over to her fellow agents. Danny is in his chair, with Martin still sitting on Danny's desk. When she moves to stand beside them, she feels like an intruder. The funny thing is that she often does, particularly with cases like this one. Martin may be the newest member of the team, but still, she feels as if it's she who will always be a stranger. It's not an unfamiliar feeling either. In her family, at school, later at the NYPD and at Quantico, and now in the job. She was always the one on the outside. The one that didn't quite fit in. She knows she'll never belong, and it's at the same time a sad and a comforting feeling knowing that there are things that never change.

"Nothing," she tells them. They take the information stoically, most likely because no one is certain whether to be relieved or disappointed to hear there's no link to another case. It means there's no serial killer or rapist at work. But it also means that there's less material to work with, and it might take them longer. Prolonged pain for the parents, less chance of finding Maggie alive.

When Sam sits back down at her computer, she feels Danny's eyes on her. She turns and smiles, but his gaze remains worried. He looks as if he's afraid she might crack up.

He might be right.

Every time she looks at the photo on the white board, she sees someone else. Maggie's blonde locks somehow transform into dark braids, her blue eyes turning hazel. Samantha doesn't remember much. Not the night they took her, or much of what happened later. She remembers white light and a searing, mind-blowing pain that seemed to last forever. And she remembers their faces. That's something she will never forget. She remembers waking up in a hospital, freezing and hurting all over, and a bearded man asking her for her name. He wanted to know what happened, but she didn't tell him. There wasn't much she could have told him. Not much he would have believed, anyway.

But that was then, and this is now; and little Maggie might very well have run out of the house all by herself because she thought she heard Buddy's bark. Maybe.

Samantha sighs and rubs her temples. "Martin, what did the neighbors say? Did they notice anything unusual? Hear a dog barking, maybe?"

She wants to believe Jack's theory. She really does.

But Martin's answer chills the blood in her veins. "If there was a dog, no one took notice. Then again, it wouldn't have been special, would it? Two out of five families in the street have dogs. There's a dog barking every few hours! But the Reeves on the left have told us they noticed some blinding light in the middle of the night. They say the woke up from it. Like lightning, they said."

All Sam can do is stare at him. There goes her fruitless attempt to believe the dog theory.

"They probably saw 'Close Encounters of the Third Kind' a couple of times too many," Danny quips. 

Samantha suddenly wants to get up and strangle him. 

When she was eleven, she had nightmares. In fact, she still has them, but she's learned to live with them, adapt. Back then, she awoke screaming every night. Her foster mother, a kind, curvy woman in her early fifties, always came to her bed, cradled her in her arms and asked what was bothering her. One night, after months of suffering alone, Sam tired of telling her she didn't remember and finally spilled the truth. Everything. Twelve hours later, she was back in the foster home. It was a hard learned lesson. People don't believe things they can't grasp.

"Did anyone else see that light?" she asks, because it seems the right thing to ask.

Martin shakes his head. "No. The Stines on the right said they didn't notice anything, and the Brodys in the house opposite are off to Boston for a week."

It doesn't mean anything, Samantha knows. Maybe the Stines are just heavy sleepers. Or maybe the Reeves have indeed vivid imaginations. Her objectivity is slipping, and Sam knows it. If they knew her background – not even the whole story in all its detailed horror, just the official one – Jack would probably have put her off the case before she can even as much as protest. But they don't know, and she's not going to enlighten them.

Jack and Vivian return from the school with a more detailed profile of Maggie, but preciously little other information. The girl is friendly and emotionally stable, apparently, with a good family background. Her parents love her to bits; they occasionally fight, but no more than any married couple. Maggie isn't slacking at school, and her grades are above average. Another couple of hours later, Jack and Martin had another talk with the distraught parents, the father having just returned from a business trip to the east coast. At this time, any suspicion that the family is somehow involved is overcome. 

The forensic report arrives at Jack's desk at three in the afternoon. There have been tracks of a dog in the mud next to the house. Jack heads off to have another chat with the parents, while Danny and Samantha visit some of Maggie's friends to find out if there had been any strange encounters lately, or if anyone had been following her.

It's a nerve-wrecking – and as it turns out, fruitless – task, but it keeps Sam busy. She's still not convinced they're on the right track, but she's not naïve enough to think Jack would even listen to her if she voiced her thoughts. 

On the way back to the office, Danny is quieter than usual. She is tempted to put it down to tiredness. It's already dark outside, and neither of them got much sleep the night before. But really, that's bullshit. They've all been through longer days. Maggie has not even been missing for 24 hours yet; and they'll probably all be on their feet for another day. Unless they find her first.

"Are you all right?" he asks, stealing a glance out of the corner of his eyes to the passenger seat.

Samantha nods. "Yeah. It's just... it's always been harder when it's a child." It's the truth, and yet not the _whole_ truth. The job is harder for all of them when it's a child, but even harder for Sam when it's a little girl and she sees herself in the victim.

"I know," Danny says. Samantha expects him to say more, but he doesn't. Not for a while, at least. "Why did the light thing upset you so much?"

She doesn't answer his question, and asks instead, "What do you think that was about?"

For a moment, he doesn't say anything, just drives. Then, he shrugs. "Don't know. A car pulling into the Whitefords' driveway maybe. Certainly not aliens."

Sam has always prided her ability to conceal what she's thinking. Unfortunately, Danny is better at reading her than most people, even Jack. The ripple that disturbs the mask of cool detachment she's wearing is brief, but she realizes that the split second of near-panic, near-anger, near-something is enough for Danny to notice.

"Come on, you're not serious!?"

She sighs. "There was a friend of mine. Went missing at age nine, returned a year later. I..." she pauses, unsure how much of herself to reveal, but decides to take a chance. "I met her at the foster home and we became close. She could remember that she was abducted and... experimented on."

Danny doesn't say a word. She doesn't know what she's expecting, but at least some sort of reaction. He just stares ahead and steers the car. It's unnerving. When the traffic lights in front of them turn red, he stops, and turns to face her. 

"Did she have any proof?"

In the face of that question and the implications, she struggled to maintain her calm. But somehow, she manages. "She didn't lie." She says the words with the conviction of fact, looking Danny square in the eyes.

He raises his hands in mock surrender. "I didn't say she did. But... you know, she was just a kid, and she'd been through a rough time." He starts the car again, moving through the traffic without looking over to her again. "The trauma from being kidnapped can cause all sorts of reaction. And sometimes, such a fantasy scenario might be easier to deal with than the reality, you know what I mean?"

Samantha wants to object, tell him that, no, alien abduction is definitely not preferable to any fate, no matter how awful. She wants to tell him that she'd rather be raped and murdered than find herself in their hands again. But she knows that's unfair, because she doesn't have anything to compare it with. After all, she's never been raped and murdered. She only wishes she were, sometimes. It would be easier than living with the memories.

"Yeah, I know," she sighs, hoping that will settle the subject.

Danny is more persistent, though. "Are you still in touch with her?"

"I've been trying to leave the past behind," she says, which is not really an answer at all, but it must suffice. And it's not even a lie. After all, trying doesn't necessarily mean succeeding.

"I thought... Well, I knew there were some issues with your parents, but I didn't know about the foster home." There's a brief flicker of something on Danny's face, gone before she can read it.

Unlike him, she keeps her expression guarded. "The foster home was first, the issues came later. Only they weren't really my parents. It's a long story." And not one she's going to share, either.

"I'm sorry." Danny reaches over to squeeze her hand. 

For the first time that day, she smiles. "Hey, I'm still standing. This story had a happy ending." 

It all depends on the definition of 'happy'.

She never made the mistake of telling her foster parents the truth again. Some truths better stay buried. And she wasn't even talking about the doubtlessly powerful people who were supposedly concealing these things. It was more the ordinary person's reaction that frightened her. So she never really opened up to her new parents. She probably wasn't the kid they'd expected when they signed up for foster care. She loved her mother, possibly more than she'd ever loved her real mother, but things were never easy. Still, she owed her much, and she was grateful for the chance they'd given her. 

Still lost in thoughts, Samantha barely registers that they've arrived at the office. It's nine-thirty. Jack calls for a quick meeting, summarizing the facts once more. The mother has called an hour ago, saying that a friend had told her an acquaintance had said he'd seen Maggie in town with an elderly woman just this afternoon. They've checked the story, but when they talked to the witness, it turns out the girl was about four years younger than Maggie and a head shorter. They still have close to nothing, except for the dog's tracks.

Jack suggests Sam should go home to get some sleep. She doesn't know what she looks like – hasn't looked at a mirror since she got herself ready for work this morning, but it must be bad, if Jack wants her to sleep. She declines, of course. There's no way she can sleep now, anyway, and she's too tired to deal with the nightmares.

* * *

Day two begins the way day one ended. Frustration settles when there's still no news at noon. Unsurprisingly, Chelsea Whiteford and her husband haven't slept a single minute that night. They're not stupid. They know that with every passing hour, the chances to find Maggie alive are decreasing.

The feeling of helplessness is the worst. The team follows every hint, but it seems as if little Maggie has dropped off the edge of the planet. 

Samantha checks in with the police if there are any child molesters recently released into the area. Jack's orders. She hasn't told him that she doesn't think Maggie has been kidnapped. It's enough to have Danny think she's nutters. She's not surprised, though, when she comes up without a suspect.

When she returns to her desk at early afternoon, there's a fresh cup of steaming hot coffee on it. Danny smiles at her. She returns the gesture, even though it's a little forced. This time, she doesn't let the coffee grow cold.

Martin enters the room a couple of minutes later, goes to his desk and frowns. Lifting the cup he finds next to his computer, he turns to Danny, eyebrows raised. " _Milk?_ "

"Well, you're enough of a caffeine junkie as it is. Thought you could do with something else to drink," Danny replies, smirking.

Involuntarily, Samantha finds herself smiling at their banter. The amusement fades as quickly as it came. They don't have the right to smile while a kid is still missing out there. 

She doesn't want to think of what Maggie is going through. She doesn't know what's worse, the thought of Maggie in the hands of some pervert, raped, tortured, probably killed, or the idea of her being taken by _them_. She knows she's doing the worst thing possible. She's identifying with the victim. And there's nothing she can do to stop herself.

* * *

The police find Maggie's body at seven.

When Samantha takes the first look at the dead girl, she has to fight down a wave of nausea. It's not that she looking awfully battered and broken – to the contrary; she looks as if she's merely sleeping on the damp ground. It's just not right that she should be dead. 

And yet, despite the horror of it all, Sam can't help but feel a relief of sorts that she's been wrong. Even though it's not the happy ending they all wanted, it's closure of some kind. 

With a grim face, Jack goes off to inform the parents. Samantha offers to join him, but he tells her to finally get some rest and takes Vivian instead. Maybe it's the better choice. After all, both Viv and Jack have children of their own. They can't quite know what the parents are going through now, but they come closer to understanding than a childless agent would.

Danny takes Samantha and Martin back to the office. They don't speak on the way back, and when Martin takes off Maggie's photo and cleans the board, they can't help but watch with a kind of morbid fascination. Martin shrugs, and silently says, "Someone has to do it." It sounds almost like an excuse. In three long steps, Danny is in front of him and draws him into a hug. Martin clings to him tightly.

Sam wishes someone would just hug her as well, but then, it's been her choice to play the ice queen for so long, now she has to live with the image. She runs a weary hand over her face, probably ruining what's left of her make-up. 

"I'm off, then."

Danny releases Martin and turns back to her. "Do you want to come along for a drink, maybe? You look as if you could use some company."

He's probably right, but... "Thanks. But I think I'll follow Jack's advice and get some sleep."

She grabs her things from her desk, slips into her jacket and walks out. 

She's almost at the elevator when she hears footsteps behind her. 

"Sam!"

Danny. She's not in the mood for any more soul-stripping discussions right now. Not when she's so close to breaking down. And he doesn't want to see that happening, he really doesn't, she thinks. Because it will be as ugly as it gets.

"Are you all right?" he asks, worried.

It's a strange question. They've just found the dead body of the little girl they've been looking for. No, she's not all right. She's not been all right for a long, long time.

Instead of an answer, she shrugs.

"That friend you've mentioned yesterday... Don't you think she'd feel better if she actually shared her story with someone over a glass of, er, nice sparkling lemonade?"

She finds her lips twitching at that. Figures that Danny would see through that. He probably heard too much of those I-have-a-friend-who stories in his life. "Will that someone tell her why he never drinks, then?"

"Probably." 

"He might need a drink after he hears her story, though," she adds with a sigh. He gently squeezes her shoulder. "Not tonight, though. But I'll get back on that offer."

"Okay." He leans over and brushes a feather kiss against her forehead, then walks back inside to join Martin.

Two hours later, when she's at home and has taken a long, hot bath, she sits at the window still with her phone in her hand, looking down at the lights of New York City, blurring in the rain and reflecting in the drops on the glass. Beside her, there's a small yellow sheet of paper with the telephone number of an apartment in Alexandria, VA. She's had it for a couple of years now, but she never used it. She wouldn't know how to start. "Hello Fox, it's me" just won't do.

She's not going to call tonight either. Maybe she never will. But she knows that she could, if she ever wants to.


End file.
